Robert Travers' analysis of British conquests in late eighteenth-century India shows how new ideas were formulated about the construction of empire. After the British East India Company conquered the vast province of Bengal, Britons confronted the apparent anomaly of a European trading company acting as an Indian ruler. Responding to a prolonged crisis of imperial legitimacy, British officials in Bengal tried to build their authority on the basis of an 'ancient constitution', supposedly discovered among the remnants of the declining Mughal Empire. In the search for an indigenous constitution, British political concepts were redeployed and redefined on the Indian frontier of empire, while stereotypes about 'oriental despotism' were challenged by the encounter with sophisticated Indian state forms. This highly original book uncovers a forgotten style of imperial state-building based on constitutional restoration, and in the process opens up new points of connection between British, imperial and South Asian history.

Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal

The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge This study shows that debate over the relations among companies, states, and knowledge is not new, but rather was integral to the politics of the British East India Company. Reconstructing such debate among Company officials and critics from the 1770s to the 1830s, the study makes several further interventions. It argues against what has been perhaps the dominant narrative about Company and British-imperial ideology in this period, a narrative of reorientation from “Orientalist” to “Anglicist” cultural attitudes. It shows instead how the Company shifted from a commercial idiom of sovereignty, concerned with conciliating elites through scholarly patronage, to a territorial idiom, concerned with cultivating popular affection through state-sponsored education. Whereas the field of the history of knowledge has largely developed as a history of structures of knowledge, meanwhile, this study argues for a history of ideas of knowledge. Such an approach is needed to elucidate the category of knowledge and its discursive uses past and present.

The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge

1. Introduction 2. The European empires in the early eighteenth century 3. The restructuring of the Atlantic empires 4. The new empires in Oceania and Asia 5. Africa and the Middle East 6. Imperial Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 7. Decolonisation and postcolonial Europe.

European Colonialism since 1700

Unravelled Dreams addresses the history of the pursuit of sericulture (silk production) in the Atlantic world, attempted by Spanish, French, British, and American empires and populations between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. It shows that in spite of repeated failures, silkworms were at the cutting edge of Atlantic imperialism. By taking the commercial failure of silk seriously, historicising it, and examining the numerous experiments (large and small) across New Spain, New France, many small corners of northern Europe, and especially British North America and the early United States, we can locate new insights into the determinative matrix of aspiration, labour, environment, and economy in these societies. Each devised its own dreams and plans of cultivation, framed by the compound particularities of cultures and landscapes. Writ large, these dreams would unravel one by one: the attempts to introduce silkworms to new regions around the Atlantic world – powered by Europeans’ consuming appetite for their fibre – ultimately constituted a step too far, marking out the limits of Europeans’ seemingly unbounded power. That they were bewildered by this failure, and for over three hundred years sought to counter environmental and demographic odds stacked against them, turning from one site to another, and mobilising every theory and workforce that they could muster, was a profoundly energising force. It opened up creative models of colonialism, exchange, domestic production and regional interconnection – some of which would disappear altogether, some fall into myths that would be recycled, and others which would become spurs to more commercially successful projects as people, policies, and ideas were recycled from silk to other more competitive and achievable products.

Unravelled Dreams: Silk and the Atlantic World, 1500–1840

Most scholars think state administrations vary because rulers attempt to maximize resource extraction given pressure from interstate competition and as constrained by the social structure of the societies they govern. This perspective cannot account for variations in British colonial tax administration in India, circa 1770 to 1855. The British organized land revenue collection and administration as a whole through two different schemes. Both systems initially adopted a rhetoric of revenue maximization, but neither was decisively better matched to Indian social structure. Instead, administrators interpreted a seemingly opaque Indian society by understanding themselves as fundamentally similar to or different from Indians.

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From Reflection to Refraction: State Administration in British India,

List of tables Preface List of abbreviations Introduction 1. Traders into sovereigns: the East India Company, 1757-1765 2. Perceptions of empire 3. The policy-makers: Parliament and the East India Company 4. Crown and Company (I): the Diwani and the inquiry of 1767 5. Crown and Company (II): foreign relations, 1766-1769 6. Attempts at reform (I): civil, military, and judicial affairs, 1767-1772 7. Attempts at reform (II): trade and revenue, 1767-1772 8. The East India Company crisis of 1772 9. Response to crisis (I): high politics and the committees of inquiry, 1772-1773 10. Response to crisis (II): trade, finance, and reform 11. The final act? the passage of Lord North's East India legislation, 1773 Conclusion Select bibliography Index.

John Money

Papers

Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics, 1757-1773.